Ivebeenreadinglately

Closing this week of posts about books and what I read here and there on my trip to England last week are some notes on people and places an...

Today, as promised , some notes on beer, drink, pubs, and the perils thereof, derived from Hogarth and others while I was in London last we...

1 Dulwich Picture Gallery , which has the distinction of being England's first public art gallery and which adjoins Dulwich College , w...

Finally, to wrap up my week of light blogging on a London theme , is a bit of Dickens . One can't, after all, write much about Lond...

Most of the London writing I've featured in my week of limited blogging has been from long before our time, so today I jump to the p...

Staying with a London theme for my week of light blogging, Hampstead, with its hills, the Heath, and the old Everyman Cinema , is one of ...

Continuing my light blogging week focused on London, we now get to what is doubtless the most ambitious book on London in recent years, Pe...

In 1931, the London edition of Good Housekeeping asked Virginia Woolf to write a series of essays on London. The Ecco Press recently publ...

I'll be busy and distracted for about a week, so blogging will take a slightly different, lighter form than usual. I'll start with a...

It's a catch-up, notes sort of day. 1. Something I didn't mention when writing about Richard Powers 's The Echo Maker (2006) ...

Richard Powers is one of those novelists whom I'd always stayed away from because I lumped him in with "idea" novelists--guys...

When winter makes a surprise reappearance, is there anything more pleasant than sinking into a big Victorian novel? For the past week, I...

I became a baseball fan the summer I turned eleven. My mother was taking classes towards a degree in social work at a college about an hour...

Part one is here and part two is here . This was all thrown into sharp relief the next morning, as, in reading Anthony Trollope 's Can ...

Part one is here . The first time they meet, Thomas says, I find I have to say things aloud so I can listen, because I'm the only person...

I picked up Salley Vickers's The Other Side of You (2006) because Michael Dirda said that fans of Marilynne Robinson , James Salter , ...

Is it just me, or does this sound like the opening sentence of an apocalyptic sci-fi novel : It started with the honeybees . Note to the uni...

Posting may be light the next week or so, because we have family in town and work has been taking up an inordinate amount of my other time a...

Every year, about this time of the pseudo-spring, I read a baseball book. I try to limit myself to one--aside, that is, from the annual Base...

Part one is here , and part two is . Ultimately, however, the reason to care about Rochester is his poetry, which at its best is remarkably ...